Those about him take care that the reproaches of
his conscience shall be stifled by the recollections of 1848 and the
dread of a new revolution. He stops his eyes and his ears, and
prepares to die calmly between his furious subjects on one hand, and
his dissatisfied protectors on the other. Any man wanting in energy,
placed as he is, would behave exactly in the same manner. The fault is
not his, it is that of weakness and old-age.
But I do not undertake to obtain the acquittal of his Minister of
State, Cardinal Antonelli.
CHAPTER XI.
ANTONELLI.
He was born in a den of thieves. His native place, Sonnino, is more
celebrated in the history of crime than all Arcadia in the annals of
virtue. This nest of vultures was hidden in the southern mountains,
towards the Neapolitan frontier. Roads, impracticable to mounted
dragoons, winding through brakes and thickets; forests, impenetrable
to the stranger; deep ravines and gloomy caverns,--all combined to
form a most desirable landscape, for the convenience of crime. The
houses of Sonnino, old, ill-built, flung pell-mell one, upon the
other, and almost uninhabitable by human beings, were, in point of
fact, little else than depots of pillage and magazines of rapine. The
population, alert and vigorous, had for many centuries practised armed
robbery and depredation, and gained its livelihood at the point of the
carbine. New-born infants inhaled contempt of the law with the
mountain air, and drew in the love of others' goods with their
mothers' milk.
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